ABSTRACT
In the 1950s, church historians following the lead of A.G.Dickens began to shift the focus of their research away from the classic documents of the Reformation and the central government’s implementation of the break from Rome. They began looking instead at local records, especially diocesan court registers, to ask how protestantism was received by people in the provinces. Did the new supremacy of the king over the English Church mean that ordinary people also rejected the authority of the pope? Did the new English Bible and the very protestant Articles of Religion of Edward VI’s reign mean that the people of England willingly accepted salvation by faith alone and willingly gave up their former regard for transubstantiation, purgatory, veneration of relics and icons, and masses for the dead? Dickens’s early work on Lollards and protestants in the northern diocese of York led him to conclude that indeed the message of the first generation of protestant reformers was received with open arms in the countryside. People disgruntled with the abuses of the Catholic Church and prepared by the anticlericalist and Bible-centred Lollard heresy readily accepted the gospel of salvation by faith alone, the English Bible and service, and the freedom from clerical domination inherent in the Catholic view of priesthood rather than ministry. Other local historians echoed Dickens’s conclusions; however, as more and more local investigations were done, it became evident that all counties and towns did not have the same experience of early and popular Reformation.
